Chapter 6. "A Night on the Town...Confrontation at the Desert Inn...Drug Frenzy at the Circus-Circus"

"...Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99� your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninty-nine cents more for a voice message. "Say whatever you want, fella. They'll hear you, don't worry about that. Remember you'll be two hundred feet tall."

Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: "Woodstock �ber Alles!"

We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

But nobody can handle that other trip--the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus [casino] and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream